The circular economy implementation in the built environment is hindered by the complexity of CE strategies and unique nature of the construction industry. Digital technologies have been explored as promising solutions to aid decision making and enable circular solutions in the architecture, engineering, and construction sector. The literature on both circular economy and digital technology fields has grown exponentially in the past few years, and there is a need for a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art applications, integrations, potential, and limitations of digital technologies in the circular economy context. Through a systematic literature review, this study identified ten key digital technologies to enable circularity in the building sector: building information modeling, spatial data acquisition, artificial intelligence and machine learning, Internet of Things, blockchain, digital twin, augmented and virtual realities, digital platform/marketplace, material passports, and additive manufacturing and digital fabrication. In this study, we review current applications, discuss their integrations, match digital technology opportunities with circular economy barriers, and map the digital technologies applications along a building’s lifecycle. Blockchain and material passport technologies demonstrated potential to enable circular economy strategies throughout the whole building’s lifecycle, but their application remains limited in the construction industry. Building information modeling was found to be at the core of most technological integrations, but more research is needed to understand the impact of such integrations in supporting circular economy policies, standards, and assessment methods. Finally, collaborative research efforts are needed to unveil the risks of digitalization in the built environment, including risks concerning privacy and cybersecurity.

In the face of escalating global climate change and the increasing frequency of extreme heat events, the mitigation of building overheating has become an urgent priority. This comprehensive review converges insights from building science and public health domains to offer a thorough understanding of the multifaceted impacts of indoor overheating on occupants. The paper addresses a significant research gap by offering a holistic exploration of indoor overheating of residential buildings and its consequences, with a specific focus on the United States, an economically diverse nation that has been underrepresented in the literature. The review illuminates the effects of overheating on thermal comfort, health, and socio-economic aspects within the built environment. It emphasizes associated repercussions, including heightened cooling energy consumption, increased peak electricity demand, and elevated vulnerability, leading to exacerbated heat-related mortality and morbidity rates, especially among disadvantaged groups. The study concludes that vulnerabilities to these impacts are intricately tied to regional climatic conditions, highlighting the inadequacy of a one-size-fits-all approach. Tailored interventions for each climate zone are deemed necessary, considering the consistent occurrence of indoor temperatures surpassing outdoor levels, known as superheating, which poses distinct challenges. The research underscores the urgency of addressing indoor overheating as a critical facet of public health, acknowledging direct socioeconomic repercussions. It advocates for further research to inform comprehensive policies that safeguard public health across diverse indoor environments.

Neighborhood characteristics influence natural urban energy fluxes and the choices made by urban actors. This article focuses on the impact of urban density as a neighborhood physical parameter on building energy consumption profiles for seven different metropolitan areas in the United States. Primarily, 30 × 30 m² cells were classified into five categories of settlement density using the US Geological Survey’s National Land Cover Dataset (NLCD), the US Census, and Census Block data. In the next step, linear hierarchical spatial and non-spatial models were developed and applied to building energy data in those seven metropolitan areas to explore the links between urban density (and other urban form parameters) and energy performance, using both frequentist and Bayesian statistics. Our results indicate that urban density is correlated with energy-use intensity (EUI), but its impact is not similar across different metropolitan areas. The outcomes of our analysis further show that the distance from buildings within which the influence of urban form parameters on EUI is most significant varies by city and negatively changes with urban density. Although the relationship between urban density parameters and EUI varies across cities, tree-cover area, impervious area, and neighborhood building-covered area have a more consistent impact compared to building and housing density.

It is becoming increasingly crucial to develop methods and strategies to assess building performance under the changing climate and to yield a more sustainable and resilient design. However, the outputs of climate models have a coarse spatial and temporal resolution and cannot be used directly in building energy simulation tools. This paper reviews methods to develop fine spatial and temporal weather files that incorporate climate emissions scenarios by means of downscaling. An overview of the climate change impact on building energy performance is given, and potential adaptation and mitigation factors in response to the changing climate in the building sector are presented. Also, methods to reflect, propagate, and partition main sources of uncertainties in both weather files and buildings are summarized, and a sample approach to propagate the uncertainties is demonstrated.

The circular economy (CE) implementation in the built environment is hindered by the complexity of CE strategies and unique nature of construction industry. Digital technologies (DTs) have been explored as promising solutions to aid decision-making and enable CE in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) sector. Despite the rapid growing literature on both CE and DTs, very few studies have reviewed practical applications of DTs in the AEC sector and their intersection with CE. There is a need for a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art applications, integrations, potential, and limitations of DT in the CE context. Through a systematic literature review, this study identified ten key DTs to enable circularity in the building sector: Building information modeling (BIM), spatial data acquisition (SDA), Artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML), Internet of things (IoT), blockchain, digital twin, augmented and virtual realities (AR/VR), digital platform/marketplace, material passports (MPs), and additive manufacturing and digital fabrication (AM/DF). We provided a comprehensive review of current applications for each DT, discussed their integrations, and mapped the DT applications along a building’s life cycle. Additionally, we identified the potential of DTs in overcoming the most reoccurring barriers to CE in the built environment: design, policies and standards, assessment methods, digitalization, and business models. Finally, we discussed the main DT limitations and future research needs.

Sustainability has for long been promoted as a medium for social and economic development, one that focuses on constant availability of natural assets and ecological amenities. By questioning the possibility of reaching a balanced and sustainable state of functioning for social-ecological systems, resilience improves the static framework of sustainability by acknowledging non-linear behavior of complex systems, inevitability of change, and consistent presence of uncertainty. At the core of sustainable development, environmental policy is embedded in the socio-spatial structures that constantly re-organize and breed uncertainty, such as political, economic, and climate uncertainty. These uncertainties create episodes of instability that shock the entire system including the structures of environmental protection. In this article, focusing on the aftermath of 2016 US presidential election and 2018 general election in Brazil, both broadly recognized as political shocks, we highlight the vulnerabilities of environmental protection structures to the rise of conservative populist movements. We attribute these vulnerabilities, partially, to the superiority of market-based instruments, as well as apolitical understandings of resilience under neoliberalism that overlook political instabilities and socio-spatial outcomes of neoliberal restructuring projects. In our assessment, political unpreparedness of sustainability against the right-wing onslaught in the US and Brazil further underlines the need for resilience theory to incorporate sources of political instability in order to protect the environment.